Question of the Day

Whose side of the story do you believe?

Toxic Oxygen

"Help! I need air. I've just spent the past hour inhaling the fumes at Oxygen, the official Web site for Oprah Winfrey's new 'for women, by women' TV network that was launched yesterday. And oh man or rather, oh person are they toxic… ."In the world of Oxygen, there are no gender roles either but that's only because they've eliminated the opposite sex. Women are everything, and men are nothing… ."Oxygen embodies a new type of feminism that I call the 'Nyaah Nyaah Sisterhood.' … Its followers no longer even pretend that they want to share in some sort of equal partnership with men… ."Their male-bashing is a tidy way of absolving themselves from taking responsibility for their lives and their relationships let alone any blame." Danielle Crittenden, writing on the "Nyaah Nyaah Sisterhood," in Thursday's New York Post

Busing hypocrites

"The television show '60 Minutes' reported in 1971 that many of Washington's leading advocates of busing sent their own children to private schools. Sen. Edward Kennedy sent his sons to St. Alban's. George McGovern, although a District of Columbia resident, paid $1,450 a year in tuition to enroll his daughter in the Bethesda public schools a school system then 3 percent black. Thurgood Marshall had two sons in Georgetown Day School. Kenneth Clark, the sociologist whose work was the main authority cited in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, sent his children to private schools as well. 'My children,' he said, 'have only one life and I could not risk that.' … Frank Makiewicz, McGovern's campaign manager; Benjamin Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post; and Sen. Phil Hart, the very liberal senator from Michigan: all Georgetown Day parents. Sen. Birch Bayh and ultra-liberal newspaper columnists Tom Wicker of the New York Times and Philip Geyelin of the Washington Post sent their boys to mingle with Sen. Kennedy's at St. Alban's… ."At bottom, the American system is founded on the belief that government ought to respond to the wishes of the majority of the people. Here, however, was an issue in which crushing, 90 percent majorities were opposed to the decisions of the political authorities. In 1968, 1972, and 1976, the voters elected presidents pledged to halt busing. Congress likewise repeatedly voted to curb busing. Yet, the courts, the federal bureaucracy, and increasingly the state bureaucracies and local school boards all enforced the busing the people despised. The government had been hijacked, and there was almost nothing an unhappy citizenry could do about it." David Frum, from his new book, "How We Got Here: The '70s, The Decade That Brought You Modern Life For Better or Worse"

Alienated tradition

"Crisis and dislocation are an office seeker's best friend, as a beleaguered Al Gore no doubt understands better than anyone else seeking the White House."Back during the 1992 presidential campaign, Gore benefited from just such a strategy when he and Bill Clinton argued passionately if ludicrously that the U.S. economy was in its worst shape since the Great Depression… ."For many intellectuals a term that covers a wide range of social critics, commentators, and writers of varying degrees of sophistication the reasons for persistent declinism are more sundry and less clear-cut. Intellectuals tend to define themselves against the vulgar crowd, and there is a long tradition in America of self-declared alienation from the mainstream they seek to influence. 'I feel I am an exile here,' wrote Herman Melville, a line that continues to resonate with figures as disparate as the Christian right's Paul Weyrich and the far left's Noam Chomsky." Nick Gillespie, writing on "Boom and Gloom," in the January issue of Reason